The $80 gadget's maker, Leap Motion of San Francisco, numbers at least two senior Apple executives among its staff - Steve Jobs's former mobile ad expert Andy Miller and interactive marketeer Michael Zagorsek - so it is not too surprising that the app store model has been harnessed by the start-up.

Yesterday, Leap announced that the apps on offer will range from serious high-fidelity gesture-based 3D design tools from AutoCAD author Autodesk, via a weather channel app offering Minority Report-style map movements, to drawing packages and a clutch of games - from speedway racing to a hand-waving version of mobile hit Cut The Rope.

Quite how the Leap manages its extraordinary resolution - it can track a 10-micrometre movement of your fingers at rates of up to 290 times per second - is still wrapped up in patents and a dose of the company's secret sauce. But with Leap - and Microsoft's lower-resolution Kinect system before it - having demonstrated the potential in this (volumetric) space, other firms not known for 3D work are now waking up to the possibilities.

So, even given analog to digital converters are decades old, and software defined radio is free, trying to make a digital Theramin would get me dropped on so hard, just because the words used to describe it are different?

5 channels sampling, 192000 samples per second, 24 bit, part per 16 million resolution? Sounds about right for Leap.
If its something else, then Id be very happy to ehar it, after all, a patent is for describing in detail how something works, so that someone who doesnt want to puchase one, can find out how to circumvent it.

Strange
on March 1, 2013 8:09 AM

Does anyone remember Zaphod trying to tune the ship's radio by waving his hands? Douglas Adams predicted this style of controller 30 years ago.